The movie was just as good as always, except that it drove Alice crazy how little Peggy Sue seemed to notice her parents. Who cared about her lame friends, about her stupid boyfriend? She should have fucked everyone as quickly as possible and then just stayed home. And her grandparents? Peggy Sue had a charmed life. She got married and had kids and still had living parents and everything in her life was perfectly fine except maybe she wanted a divorce. It wasn’t actually time travel at all, not really. Peggy Sue faints and has a dream. It seemed like one of those movies where they might have made three different endings because the test audiences didn’t like the one they were shown. Alice wanted to see the ending where Kathleen Turner crawled around the floor of a bar looking for a rabbit hole but couldn’t find one and so was trapped forever, making the same mistakes all over again. Alice wanted to see the horror movie version. But then again, she might be about to live it, so maybe she didn’t need to see it after all.
Leonard nudged her. Alice had fallen asleep, her head leaning against the arm of the couch like the bottom half of seesaw. In her forty-year-old body, her neck would have been sore for days, but in this one, Alice just sat up.
“Pizza time,” Leonard said.
* * *
? ? ?
V&T was on the corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, across the street from St. John the Divine, where Leonard had taken Alice every year on Saint Francis Day, when they opened the enormous front doors and let an elephant walk in. As a family, the Sterns did not celebrate any religious holidays, but they celebrated lots of New York holidays: in addition to Saint Francis Day with the elephants, there was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, when they would go and watch the balloons get inflated the night before; there were the Christmas windows in the fancy department stores on Fifth Avenue; there were San Gennaro and Chinese New Year, for cannoli and dumplings; and there was the Puerto Rican Day Parade, when all of uptown was flooded with reggaeton, and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, when it was equally boisterous, but with bagpipes.
The pizza wasn’t the best slice in the city—it was the gooiest. It was as if the pizza oven had a slight dip in the middle, which caused every single pizza to have a molten, liquid center, the vortex of a whirlpool. The cheese slid one way or the other, and the first person to pick up a slice was bound to pull the whole gooey mess off the slice’s siblings and have to rearrange the pizza with their fingers or a handy knife. Alice loved it. When she and Leonard got to the corner, Sam was pacing in front.
“Hi,” Sam said. She clutched Alice’s arm. “Come pee with me.”
Leonard waved them on.
The bathroom was small and empty. Sam flushed the toilet and turned on the tap.
“Don’t make fun of me, okay?” Sam asked. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Obviously I am not in a position to make fun, nor would I ever!” Alice said. “Please. Tell me.” The bathroom smelled like Lysol and tomato sauce.
“Okay, so my mom loves Time Brothers, you know that. So I was looking through it, and then I started looking through some other books that she has—it turns out, for a professor, that woman has a lot of time travel shit on her shelf.” Sam was clearly filled with too many words she wanted to say at once. “I think there are two main options, in terms of what’s going on. Not options as in you have a choice—two theories.”
“Okay,” Alice said. Sam was still like this, thank god—thoughtful and smart and willing. Alice wanted to tell her that it was these very qualities that made her a great mom, but didn’t.
“Basically, I think you’re either stuck here or you’re not. So, Scott and Jeff, they have this car, right, and the car carries them around, just like Marty McFly, you know? That’s not you. And the fact that you’re inside your own body, no offense, seems like a bad sign. Like, if there were two of you, and you were watching yourself do things, like in Back to the Future Part II, then obviously you would be able to go back, because otherwise there would be two of you forever, see what I’m saying?”
“Yes?” Alice said.
“I think it’s probably a wormhole. Scott and Jeff went through a wormhole once, do you remember? It’s not in the book, but it was on the show—you know the episode I mean? When they were on Scott’s family’s farm in Wisconsin and it was all, ‘Doop doop doop, guess we’re not time-traveling this time,’ like they were on vacation or whatever, and then Scott was helping his grandmother clean out an old barn and then all of a sudden it was 1970 and Scott was a baby? And spent the whole day as a baby? But he was with his grandmother and you got to see how his mother died? And then the next day, he was himself again, but different? I think it could be like that—like, you went into the barn.”
“And now I’m the baby.”
“Yes, but you know you’re the baby.”
Someone knocked on the bathroom door. It was the only bathroom in the restaurant. Alice turned off the faucet and shouted, “Be right out!” She and Sam made eye contact in the mirror. “I don’t really know what to do, though.”
Sam shrugged. “Let’s start with pizza.”
* * *
? ? ?
When they got back to the table, Leonard had already ordered them Coca-Colas, and a wan salad of iceberg lettuce and pale tomatoes sat in the middle of the red-checked tablecloth. Pathetic pizzeria salads were the only salads Leonard actually liked. The girls settled into their chairs across from Leonard and each took a long gulp of soda. Sam wasn’t allowed to drink soda at home, and so she drank it like crazy when she was with Alice and Leonard.
“Are you sure you need to go to the conference tonight?” Alice asked.
Leonard raised an eyebrow. “Pepperoni? Mushroom? Sausage and peppers? Don’t you already have something planned?”
Sam gasped. “Leonard! You aren’t supposed to know!”
“It’s fine, have a little party.” He smiled. The waiter brought over a glass of red wine, and Leonard thanked him. “I trust you.”
He’d brought his bag—a beat-up satchel from the army/navy store. It was hanging on the back of his chair. Leonard would go straight to the hotel in midtown for the convention. Alice had been so focused on herself, she hadn’t even noticed.
“You’re really going?” Alice asked.
“Oh, come on, you two don’t want me around. You have fun. I’ll call to check in tomorrow morning, but you have the hotel number if you need me. It’s on the fridge.” Leonard took a swig of wine and puckered. “That is . . . vinegar. But I love vinegar. Happy birthday, my baby.” Leonard raised his glass.
Alice groaned, despite herself. “Dad.”
“Happy birthday, Alice,” he tried instead.
She nodded. “Thanks. Okay.”
An hour later, Leonard slung his bag over his shoulder and headed out with a wave as the bell over the door tinkled. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock. Alice couldn’t remember what happened next, the first time.
30
The house on Pomander seemed smaller at night. somehow the lack of sunlight, meager though the sunlight ever was reaching over the much taller buildings that surrounded their narrow walk, made the space feel even tighter. Alice and Sam had filled the fridge with beer, and they put bowls of potato chips out on the kitchen table. Alice smoked, nervous. Sam was rifling through the closet, pulling out different options.
“Tell me something scandalous,” Sam said.
Alice took a drag and thought about what she would have been most impressed by on her sixteenth birthday. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people.”
Sam stopped and held a clump of dresses to her chest. “How many is a lot?”
She didn’t know the exact number—college had been fuzzy, as had large swaths of her twenties. Did blow jobs count, or times when she’d started having sex but gotten interrupted and then just given up? “Thirty? Or so?” There had been many years when she’d only slept with one person, and years when she’d spent six months without so much as a kiss. But there were a lot of years with a lot of people in between.